I write about this in very first sentence of The Nakedness of the Fathers: “I am and am not a Jew.” I am a Jew by blood, but according to Orthodox Ju… - Alicia Ostriker

There was a beautiful stretch of time-the sixties, early seventies-when everybody's musical culture was together, and that was great. But now the shared culture is television commercials.

all art is political. Either it is politicial or it is wallpaper. I like to say that poetry which takes no risk is like wallpaper. It makes a pleasant background...Homer is political. Dante is political. Shakespeare is political. Milton is political. But it is usually only the art that comes from dissenting or revolutionary movements that gets called political...Of course, art is not merely political-it is many other things too. That's what makes the difference between art and propaganda. Propaganda is good for the moment, but art stays good, stays fresh, when the moment has passed. Tsvetayeva is a beautiful example. So is Akhmatova.

Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading remarks that when poetry and music move too far from their origins in music and dance, they atrophy and need renewal. We should add that when poetry and the poet move too far from their origins in communal expression-too far from participatory performance and the expectation of shared human feeling, too far into a regulated and predictable literacy bound up in academic role playing, where the reader is either passive appreciator-student or judgmental critic-professor-they are again in need of reinvigoration. Today our schools for the most part train poets and critics into postures of detachment and impersonality, as if our encounters with the life of poetry ought to resemble our encounters with law and bureaucracy. We dread, it seems, the embarrassment and pain of personal and poetic self-disclosure. We have forgotten that "subjectivity" may be as severe and demanding a discipline as "objectivity." If poetry written by women today demands that we read as participants-identifying, gratified, terrified, irritated, disagreeing, even repelled-it may help us "discover self' and may also help us discover wider perspectives for art. I have stressed throughout this book the adversary relation between the women's poetry movement and the "larger" culture, derived from women's cultural marginality. In our own time, a gynocentric poetics is necessarily adversarial. Yet in another sense it may be that women's poetry is simply a vehicle through which, at the present moment, the ongoing life of poetry is being preserved and extended. We must remember that all poetry is marginal in relation to the material preoccupations of society; that all poetry is potentially disruptive to rulers and institutions; and that all poetry depends for its survival not on literary fashions but on the interior needs of readers who for their own reasons respond with pleasure to it. When Whitman in Song of Myself wrote "Camerado, this is no book. Who touches this touches a man, and "What I assume you shall assume," he articulated an abiding impulse latent within all poetry. The women's poetry movement today is a carrier of that same impulse and makes it possible for us to "assume" more than we did before.